Seven of the 17 Europeans detained in an alleged attempt to kidnap 103 African children in Chad have been released and left the country with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The Europeans - including nine French citizens - were arrested on 25 October when the Zoe's Ark charity was stopped from flying the children to France.

The group said they were orphans from Sudan's Darfur region where more than 200,000 have died in conflict since 2003.

It said it intended to place them with host families.

However, aid workers who interviewed the children said most of them had been living with adults they considered their parents and came from the Chadian-Sudanese border.

The 17 originally detained included six French charity workers, three French journalists and the crew of the plane, which was made up of Spaniards and a Belgian pilot.

The six charity workers have been charged with kidnapping and are still in detention.

Another four - three Spanish crew and the 75-year-old Belgian-pilot - are being held on accessory-charges.

Mr Sarkozy met Chad's leader, Idriss Deby, trading back slaps and cheek kisses, before leaving on his official jet with the three French journalists and four flight attendants from Spain.

"They are free. It's over. It's the end," said Jean-Bernard Padare, a lawyer for the group.

The French president's plane landed last night at a Spanish air force base outside Madrid, where Mr Sarkozy and the flight crew members were greeted by Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and relatives of the flight attendants.

The group then continued on to France, landing at a military air base outside Paris. Friends and family greeted the three French journalists with excited hugs.

One of the three, Marie-Agnes Peleran, briefly defended the character of the charity workers still detained in Chad. "They're idealists but not criminals," she told LCI television.

Earlier, Mr Deby said that he acted on his own volition when he freed the seven. "There is no pressure on Chad, nor on President Deby," he claimed.

French television channel M-6 later aired a documentary made mostly with footage shot by one of the freed journalists, cameraman Marc Garmirian.

It shows one charity worker haphazardly screening children brought by tribal elders to the group's centre in eastern Chad.

Asked if she could be mistaken on the most basic facts - such as whether individual children were Chadian or Sudanese or even orphans - she acknowledges she could be wrong.

In other scenes, the charity workers wrap the children's heads and limbs in gauze bandages, dousing some of them with iodine to make them look, in the words of one worker, like "war casualties".

On Saturday, the head of Zoe's Ark, Eric Breteau, told judicial officials in Chad that the journalists and flight crew had nothing to do with the group's activities.